trendpreneur

Lifehacker recently published an article “Five Best Startup Management Tools”, which I naively thought was a post on entrepreneurial webapps, but is in fact about autorun and trimming your Windows boot sequence. I don’t even use Windows (unless forced), so the article — which I keep seeing linked around the place — annoys me on multiple levels.

Here’s my take on what Lifehacker should have written to satisfy the other meaning of ’startup’. (Yes, it’s sort of a list post; I have another blog post brewing on that subject, and more.) The five top tools that help me run my startup, day in, day out, manage everything that’s going on, and not go insane in the process.

1. Email and Twitter

Two for the price of one. Really, the number-one ‘management tool’ that keeps everything flowing is communication, but there are platforms and webapps and gadgets galore for such a basic human act. I spend 95% of my communication time writing, reading and managing email or Twitter. Email… well, no need to go into details, although multiple inboxes, superstars, more filters than you can shake a stick at and labelling really save the day. Not sure what I’d do without Gmail.

Twitter isn’t a key internal management tool, but it has great benefits of its own — new opportunities, new contacts, quick attention-grabbing DMs, keeping up to date on trends, fostering relationships with key people and building a brand/reputation around a specific anchor. This isn’t just idle speculation, either; everything I just listed has actually resulted from my use of Twitter as a sort of mixed corporate-personal communication channel (both on @jennielees and, in August, our shared @festbuzz).

2. Dropbox

I use multiple machines, from multiple locations, across multiple platforms. Having the headache of ‘oh shit, that file’s on that computer 300 miles away’ totally removed from my life is worth the Pro subscription’s weight in gold. I mainly use this for startup work, as personal stuff is just less likely to be as vital, but I’m starting to put more trivial content into Dropbox just for the convenience. Because it’s a ‘real’ folder, I’m not worried about losing the data, but I am a little niggled by the ‘it’s all on the cloud’ aspect — I deal with uber-secure stuff in a slightly more paranoid way. Not sure how I’d transition from personal-dropbox to startup-dropbox shared with multiple people, but I can totally see the benefit of that as we grow.

3. Skype

We don’t use this tremendously much but it’s been insanely valuable when we have. Being a distributed company with the main lynchpin in the arse-end of Scotland people often assume we can meet face to face with them when we can’t; free video calling really does help to bridge the gap. (And, initially, having an 0131 number without a real phone.)

“Virtual facetime” isn’t quite the same as real facetime though, so I should probably add a tiny mention for Easyjet here, despite their monumental awfulness. (And big up the Generator hostel in London, yo.) My mileage for the year’s nowhere near Ewan’s, but I’ve still spent plenty of time on those lovely bright orange 6.30am planes.

4. Macbook Pro

My trusty laptop. I’d say “a” laptop is useful — really, required — to run a startup, but major props to the MBP (disclaimer: matter of personal taste). It’s over three years old, and although it feels quite sluggish now, and the battery life is somewhat laughable — about one and a half hours — it’s definitely served me well.

The main reason I love Macs is because I’m a control freak and command-line junkie on one level, but I also like shiny pretty things. OSX combines the best of both worlds in a way that’s well and truly converted me to the Cult of Jobs; I can get dirty stuff done quite happily in Terminal, set up a near-perfect coding environment that beats ‘four-terminal fwvm2′ into the dust, and yet also use a fantastic array of apps which are generally jolly good. And it doesn’t do games, which is great for a work machine, but it does do WoW, which is great for a junkie’s fix on the road (yesyes, I gave up for good over six months ago).

Honourable mention goes to the iPhone for keeping me connected on the move (providing there’s signal), but frankly, its call quality is terrible, the no-ring/voicemail bug is frustrating in the extreme, the ‘no service’ weirdness I’ve experienced lately is even worse, and the bewildering array of apps is entertaining yet ultimately a huge problem that’s just not being solved. Yes, it’s a great mobile email, web and SMS client, yes, some of the apps are great, yes, Google Maps has saved me more times than I can count. But international data rates, poor signal, low battery etc mean it’s usually an expensive iPod most of the time I’m travelling.

5. Other Startups

One of the things that has helped me learn, improve and generally stay on top of things has been other people — specifically other people who are, or have been, in the same boat. Thanks to communities such as Hacker News it’s easy to learn from others’ mistakes and get a quick opinion before you plunge; of course, I’ve still made plenty of my own, but I feel I somehow did so with a little education. There are a load of events that help startups in various ways, through learning, networking, presentation practice and so on, and it’s easy to get carried away and go to too many. However, having the option and the amount of information there for the taking is still great.

In meatspace, it’s also important to balance the often-isolated habits of entrepreneurship with the real world, and that’s where things like the Informatics Ventures/TechMeetup communities and EPIS have really helped. There’s something nice about the size and energy of the Edinburgh tech community; it’s small enough that you can really get to know people well and yet not too small to be insignificant.

Events like the Silicon Valley speaker series, Ken Morse courses, School for Startups and so on bring the world to Edinburgh. We still have a lot of barriers to get over to put the city on the map, so to speak, and there are plenty of times when I wish I was in London — but I do sense a force for change up here and some genuinely serious interest and investment in pushing Edinburgh’s ’scene’ further.

A side note: simply being in the right place is important to startup management, although not necessarily a deal-breaker. For example, it’s easier to manage a company if your co-founders, employees, investors and clients are all in the same city as you! However, it’s not impossible to succeed if none of them are, which is practically the case for me — you just have to think about things a little differently, and use tools such as those listed above to help with the process.

Having said that, there is a balancing act on hand. Despite the loveliness of Edinburgh and its awesome community, I’m going to be spending the next year in San Francisco simply because I feel I need to be there in person to nurture various things along, and get to a stage I don’t feel I can achieve remotely. But I’ll be back, and that’s what counts.

Photo is of Citizen Space, where I spent a happy nomadic afternoon working. Fortunately, the hot desks have power sockets.

I’m trying to catch up on the notable talks of LeWeb — so far I haven’t seen anything revolutionary come out of it, but a few interesting things, so it’s hard to figure out what to watch (especially since my attention span for online video is absolutely terrible; I prefer transcripts 90% of the time). Still, this talk caught my eye as danah’s work is pretty awesome. It’s definitely worth a watch (and it has a transcript/crib, yay!).

There were two main themes as I understand it; firstly the concept that we all see the Internet differently, and secondly the question of whether we are looking or not. The former is something that’s fascinated me for a while. Being able to see someone else’s world through their eyes — through unedited honest life-stream social media updates, through their Facebook photos, etc — can verge on gratuitous voyeurism. It’s taking the idea of a reality celeb to a new level, in a way. Internet superstars don’t have to be A-list or royalty, they can just be the sort of people whose wry observations about daily life (be it a blog, YouTube channel or even Twitter stream) are entertaining and a form of escapism.

As well as e-stalking interesting people, the more useful (and far more voyeuristic) side of this is e-stalking people I vaguely know. Catching up on old friends’ or past acquaintances’ lives via their LinkedIn, Facebook photos, etc; it somehow seems all right to live vicariously through people if you’ve actually met them. Kinda.

The second theme is about the ugly stuff. There’s a lot of nasty things that happen in this world and increasingly, victims are talking about them online. Bullying isn’t more prevalent now than it used to be, but it is more visible, and the problem is that people assume that there’s an automatic equation between stuff being online and stuff being seen. As anyone who’s ever written a blog knows, you can often be writing for an audience of one, and even if you have a hundred Myspace friends, there’s no guarantee anyone’s listening. Or that their reports to the authorities of your accounts of mistreatment at home will ever get taken seriously.

It’s sort of a cross between Neighbourhood Watch and “eyes on the street“. We need to look out for the disturbing stuff, violence, crime, etc., and use that constructively to help people, to open up conversations rather than jump to conclusions. Because appearance is everything, and someone posting about drug use or self-harm on their Livejournal might be doing it to fit in, not as a cry for help. It’s so hard to find where the boundaries are between the projected image you want to create online, and the real self underneath. The move towards real-time stream-of-consciousness updating kind of helps, but even a simple tweet such as “Help me” needs to be taken in context.

I’m not at LeWeb (though Steven is), but two cool things have come out of it so far today.

Firstly, firehose access — hurrah!

Secondly, Tweetminster Search (TechCrunch link) is… interesting. It’s a very hard problem to get right, measuring the sentiment of Twitter against a particular term; if the search term is “Labour”, do you search for tweets with the term “labour” in, expand the lexicon based on domain knowledge (“Government”, “Gordon Brown”), or perhaps search every tweet by a Labour MP? The methods and results seem to be in a very early stage right now, but this is something I’ve been thinking about and looking into, so cut them some slack for the rough edges. (Having said that, I will level this one criticism: as the service stands, I can’t really find anything useful out.)

Visualisation of political opinion, trend-spotting, disaster management and voting prediction are all going to become super hot over the next few months. Tweetminster Search is timely, and the mentioned API will be something definitely worth playing with; one area Tweetminster definitely adds value in is the curation of domain knowledge, i.e. maintaining a list of MPs and related Twitter accounts (news etc), and presumably caching those tweets. Firehose or no, having a readymade domain specific API is a NLP hacker’s dream. Honest.

OK, OK, so I already tweeted this, but it’s interesting. Hillary Mason set up intelligent email autoresponders to deal with repetitive email enquiries and politely nag people for replies. It’s good stuff, and something I’ve never really got around to doing myself, for a couple of reasons (besides the obvious); I use Gmail, and to be honest, no two emails I send are the same.

(It’s an interesting overlap with Project India, by the way… I don’t know why I’m so excited about this year’s Group Projects. Either because they’re kind of real, or because I miss academia. Or both?)

The downsides of using Gmail haven’t really affected me personally, but thinking about it, I would like to be able to actually access my raw email to set up better, NLP-based filters. I have a lot of email filters, and a lot of labels, and a system that just about works (thanks to superstars and multiple inboxes). But, you know, it could be better, and despite IMAP access it doesn’t quite flow; if I wanted to process mail, I’d have to access it all on a random box, and then what? I can’t apply Gmail labels or superstars or mark as read, can I? I guess what I really want is to operate on both the protocol/content and the interface itself, and that’s asking a wee bit too much. Oh well. Time to hack on a communication platform that I can play with…

(credit to Craig, who linked me the video, and will complain if I don’t acknowledge his genius.)

A too-long-for-Twitter thought.

Tech conferences often don’t have many, if any, female speakers. This is an ‘issue’ whether we like it or not.

Why? Because inevitably someone will make a fuss. Usually the feminist sitting in the third row who lovingly flies the ‘female geek’ flag everywhere she goes. (Look, I think we’ve all been through that phase. It’s the pride-in-being-a-minority transition from realising-I’m-different to not-caring). The last thing an event organiser wants is to be The One Who Discriminated Against Women, Oh Look, There Aren’t Any Speaking At His* Conference.

So how do we ‘fix’ this?

Option 1. Go out of your way to find and invite female speakers, offering them bribes and extras to come along, paying for their flights when you don’t pay for male speakers, etc.
Option 1a. …stopping when you have a token female to keep the feminists happy.

Option 2. Make a reasonable attempt to make female speakers aware of the event by circulating the CFP among female tech networks as well as the usual channels, and hope some come forward.
Option 2a. …With an emphasis on the fact you would like female speakers at the event.
Option 2b. …With the CFP committee evaluating talk proposals without knowledge of the proposer’s gender.

Option 3. Hire a few models, put them in Thinkgeek t-shirts, and hope nobody notices.

Option 2 may lead to an unbalanced awareness of the event among various channels, but (to me at least) it’s the obvious winner. As I was pointing out re: some startup events going on around this time of year, if people don’t know about it, they won’t come. The ‘usual channels’ may end up being very male-dominated, just due to the skew in your tech field of choice; this conversation started around a Ruby event, and I honestly do not know a single female Ruby developer. If Option 2 results in no female proposals, so be it. There may be no proposals from Welsh people, but who’s complaining about that?

I’d also recommend against 2a (positive discrimination can of worms) or, if 2a is invoked for higher publicity/circulation among female networks (“we don’t have any women speaking so far, and it’s a disgrace!”), you really want to invoke 2b as well. Nobody wants to be put somewhere just because they’re an X. (And hey, being Welsh hasn’t got me on a single stage so far; who do I complain to?)

So there you go. Women at conferences? Don’t break your back. Awareness and open arms, and less of the “we need women, you get a free pass, flights, 5 star hotel and complimentary hair styling and manicure on the day” — this should keep everyone happy. Couple of extra things: If you’ve got a mixed line up of speakers, and draw panellists from previous speakers, make sure it’s representative (as long as it’s relevant) — MSM09 backchat was grumpy that with two excellent female speakers, the panels were all-male. Secondly, check your audience balance. If no women attend, maybe that’s why no women spoke…

(* Is this an issue with female-run events? I don’t know. Events I’ve attended where I’ve known the organiser have unilaterally been male-run, but often with a bit of female help, such as Mike Butcher organising TechCrunch Europe events but with Petra behind the scenes doing all the hard work ;) Still, my guess is that an obviously female-run event wouldn’t fear being accused of being sexist, so this entire issue is avoided.)